Viacom aims to capitalize on the smartphone video viewing boom among so called Millennials to make early headway in the burgeoning global OTT arena. As Netflix pushes ahead with its global expansion country by country, Viacom wants to get there in one leap through deals with MNOs around the world, exploiting global recognition of its MTV brand to promote strategic relationships with them.
The initial focus will be on music, with MNO partners already signed up in Germany, Switzerland and Romania for the MTV Trax app, launched in partnership with MusicQubed in the UK. This is a ‘play-as-you-go’ digital music service tailored for pre-pay customers, which is also due to launch in New Zealand.
Viacom is also making available its MTV Play app developed in partnership with multi-screen technology developer Vigour, enabling consumers to ‘flick’ MTV video content across their screens. These two video and music streaming apps are being offered to MNOs as part of exclusive brand licensing pacts, aiming particularly at the millennial market.
While tablet viewing is booming among older demographics, Viacom has observed how smartphones, especially the latest big screen models, are dominating millennial multiscreen viewing. Over 40% of 16-24 year olds regularly watch shows on smartphones, compared with just 17% on tablets, according to Viacom, whose content is particularly suited to smaller devices.
The biggest smartphones virtually overlap with the smallest tablets anyway and although tablets can boot up just as quickly, smartphones are more convenient and ready to hand for snacking content on the go, and have big enough screens now to make the experiences interchangeable.
Launching on 5th March in Germany, Switzerland and Romania, subscribers to MTV Mobile branded tariffs will get free access to MTV Play, while other consumers will be able to access the same content for €2.99 a month or €29.99 a year. Subscribers will have access to a library of more than 1,500 hours of MTV’s most popular TV content, as well as a preview episode of new series, such as Catfish (season 4) in advance of their linear TV transmission.
MTV Trax is tailored for pre-pay customers and casual music fans who want to avoid the higher tariffs and full blown all-in streaming services. The app allows 100 top music tracks to be downloaded to smartphones and updated daily, allowing offline play. MTV Trax is being launched as a direct-to-consumer subscription service in the UK on 3rd March, available through the App Store, Google Play or Windows Phone Store, following successful completion of a successful trial, followed by New Zealand in partnership with an unnamed MNO.
Although starting with MTV on demand content, Viacom is also preparing the ground for possible linear services over mobile, including its Nickelodeon and Comedy Central TV channels. Signals of such intent are evident from Viacom’s deal with Sony announced September 2014 covering over 20 cable networks, including Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central, for Sony’s US OTT service, PlayStation Vue, testing of which began two months later.
This was Viacom’s first deal to make its networks available via an Internet based live TV and VOD service, so it would seem logical to follow up outside the US through the MNO partnerships it is already establishing. The Sony announcement came a year after rumors of the pact leaked out. Sony had hinted then that it would be offering online content from Viacom among other networks, which we now know include CBS, Fox, NBCUniversal and Discovery Communications. The Sony service is confined to gamers at this stage, only available to users of its PlayStation console with a broadband connection.
One ironic twist coincided with the MTV mobile announcement when Suddenlink, a smallish US MSO serving 1.14 million homes from Oklahoma and Texas east to North Carolina, revealed that it had retained 99.7 percent of its customers in the fourth quarter of 2014 after ditching Viacom channels from its lineup to save money.
The operator interpreted this as evidence of an upside to cord cutting, which meant that now the consumer rather than content was king. The implication was that its subscribers went online anyway to find content the operator was not providing, so that it should confine itself to news and original local material not available anywhere else. It could then save money on unnecessary carriage fees.
But an alternative view, less charitable to Viacom would be that this finding showed its channels belong to the long tail making up the numbers rather than being premium material that creates “stickiness”. The implication is that Netflix at least has little to fear from Viacom’s assault on global OTT since it has little compelling content comparable, with something like the House of Cards.